Tag Archives: Cody Cameron

Today, in honour of International Animation Day I review Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2. I saw the 2009 Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs quite a while ago and vaguely remembered enjoying it, I was surprised to find that they were making a sequel, worried that this may be the beginning of the road to another disaster along the lines of Shrek 4.

While Cloudy 2 doesn’t yet descend to the levels of the true Dreamworks sellout the plot is somewhat shoehorned into place by force. The film begins by recapping the first film but with the addition of Flint’s (Bill Hader) childhood hero, which the film asks us to accept as having always existed. This is really very jarring, the backstory which sets up the emotional thrust of the film is entirely forced in the first fifteen minutes. It’s clumsy, lazy and outright bad filmmaking.

However, once the film hits its stride and the exposition is out of the way it drastically improves. The cast is pared down to the truly comical characters with the genius addition of Steve Jobs Chester V as antagonist. The world that is built for this film includes living food animals and an island entirely taken over by food landscapes. It’s a bizarre technicolour dreamland that’s utterly engrossing.

From this point onwards the film is a rapid-fire string of jokes. Switching between wry, satirical criticisms of rich entrepreneurs and as many food related puns as can physically be said in 90 minutes. It’s not an awful lot of substance for a film to live off of, but it’s a short film and the jokes really don’t let up for a minute. So you can forgive the dull, contrived plot because above all else this film will make you laugh, pretty consistently, for about an hour. That’s worth my time.